More and more evidence still points to something that practitioners in education have known for millennia: human learning and performance cannot be simply described from a cognitive or even sociocultural perspective
alone. In order to fully understand how we process the world around us, we need to consider our affective responses to the information we perceive. This is especially important for the designers of digital educational materials, as these materials offer many important opportunities to incorporate emotional considerations. However, few if any theories of learning with media consider emotions, and if they do, they do so only in very limited ways. In this chapter, we first review definitions of key terms related to emotion and learning, and summarize research on emotional design in digital media for learning. We then present a theoretical framework of learning from digital media that emphasizes the integration of emotional and cognitive processing and of related design factors, and describe a resulting research agenda for the study of emotional design.